Jack opened his mouth and shut it and tossed her the keys. When she had them rolling, she asked Jack where they were going now.
“Crescent Beach. My house,” said Jack.
Pandora glanced over at him, saw he was dead serious. Put it in gear. Didn’t ask why.
nostalgia...from the greek nostos (to return home) and algos (the pain)
It was roughly seventy miles from Amelia Island to Jack Redding’s house at Crescent Beach. On the way down Pandora tried a couple of times to get Jack to tell her what the hell was going on, but he just shook his head and stared out the windshield so after a few miles of this she just gave it up and did the same thing. She did take the time to put on some chick-flick music, the theme from Eat Pray Love, which she knew Jack loathed, the film and the music, so there was that to enjoy as the miles unspooled.
They talked a bit about the name Dorsey, and Diana Bowman’s interest in it. Pandora ran the name on NCIC as they got clear of Amelia Island, cross-referencing it with the name Diana Bowman. Nothing. Insufficient data. But she filed it away.
Dorsey, or something like it. She was going to talk to Jack about it but from the expression on his face, she could tell he was a long way gone.
The road was oceanside, and off her left shoulder the Atlantic Ocean was the occasional patch of cobalt blue seen at the far end of all the little alleys and side roads that led off A1A and down onto the beaches. Far out at sea a hard-edged charcoal-gray front was slowly turning like a galaxy in space, its vast and swollen belly pulsing with green light. Seabirds were wheeling and crying and there was a hot and sultry stillness in the air.
“Something big out there,” she said, to try to get some kind of conversation going, but Jack just glanced past her, registered it, and went back inside himself. Sighing, Pandora hit the Weather Advisory on the MDT.
She got a radar image that showed a storm front that stretched from Bermuda to Nassau, that all-too-familiar shape, turning slowly counterclockwise and eating up all the light.
It was still being called a “tropical storm” but more times than not, on hot sultry afternoons such as this one, that was as useful a term as calling a terrorist attack a “man-made disaster.”
“Look, Jack, I hate to disturb you while you’re having fun being all silent and brooding, but maybe you should take another look at this huge black cloudy thing off there to our left?”
He did, and then he looked at the MDT.
“It’s hours away, even if it does hit this part of the coast.”
“Yeah, but if it does, do we really want to be doing whatever the hell it is we are going to be doing down at your beach house?”
Silence, then a non sequitur. Sort of.
“Actually it’s not my beach house. Doesn’t feel like it, anyway. It was my grandfather’s place. For me, it still is. We lived over in Gainesville. Used to visit him during the summer. Sometimes I’d go alone. He and my dad didn’t get along. Dad was a Democrat, they always fought about politics. Until my folks moved to Phoenix. He asked me if I wanted to stay with him, instead of going out West.”
“You don’t talk about your folks much.”
Jack smiled, looking down at his hands.
“Dad has always been a little...ashamed...of Clete. Yeah it was ‘Clete.’ Clete hated all that ‘Pops’ or ‘Poppa’ stuff. With him it was either ‘Clete’ or ‘Sir.’ I went for ‘Clete.’”
“Your dad is Declan, right? Why was he ashamed of Clete?”
She had an idea, but if Jack Redding was in a mood to talk—which happened, like, never—she wanted to give him room.
“Well. To start with, Dad was raised by cousins, Frank and Helen Forrest, because of the death threats Clete was getting, after that Vizzini thing. So Dad resented being sent away. Never really got to know Clete at all. And then it was the seventies, Dad was starting up his real estate business, most of his clients were Democrats, against the war in Vietnam, all that radical lefty shit. Clete was this huge fireball of a guy, fought in Korea, could still fit into his Blue Dress uniform when he was eighty. A hard man all the way to the end. Tough strong quiet.”
“Gee. Remind you of anyone?”
Jack sighed, reached for the water bottle, offered it to her—she took a drink and handed it back and he drained half of it.
“And of course there was that Corruption Cloud. Hung over all of us, like that storm cloud building up out there. Mom and Dad wanted to keep their distance, because of their business I think, but mostly they were just ashamed of Clete, ashamed to be associated with the name Redding. Eventually they bailed out to Phoenix.”
“Not you though.”
“No. I stayed. I was in my teens by then. I didn’t want to leave the coast... Dad didn’t like it, but he agreed to let me stay with Clete. I don’t know, maybe he was happy to unload me. I was a handful back then.”
“And...?”
“And I loved the guy. He was larger than life, loved big hated big. He drank he smoked he got into fights. You either hated him or loved him. Most people loved him. The ones who knew him, I mean.”
“I remember you telling me that his house meant a lot to him.”
“Yeah. It did. He didn’t come from money, his father was a coal miner in Pennsylvania.”
“Oh man. An endangered species now.”
“Were then too. Mine explosions. The Black Lung. Cave-ins. Union Busters. So when he came into some money—”
He paused here, expecting a comment, but she had no intention of saying what the general rumor was. Jack looked sideways at her. He knew what she wasn’t saying, and he liked her for it.
“Anyway, he had it built in the fifties. Cost him a couple hundred grand, a lot of money in those days.”
“Worth a lot more now,” she said, wondering where all of this highly unusual talk was going.
Jack turned the music down, but not off. He may be a big red dog, she thought, noting the natural grace that was always in him when it came to little gestures, like not turning off the chick-flick music he loathed, but he’s a gentleman.
“Yeah, I guess it is. It was worth a lot while he was still alive, but he would never even think about selling it. You didn’t say anything back there, about ‘coming into money’—”
“And I never would.”
“I know that. I know you pretty well.”
“Now, there’s an understatement.”
“But I think, for Clete, the house was something he felt he had sold his honor for—”
“You don’t believe that?”
“I believe that something happened, and that the house was a symbol of it.”
“But if the house was a symbol of something he was ashamed of, why wouldn’t he get rid of it?”
“Because I think that he did something about it, and after that the house felt...different.”
“Something like that night he went after the entire Vizzini family alone?”
“Maybe that. But...there’s something more going on. There was something else...”
“Going on, like in the present? Is this why we’re going back to the house now?”
“Yeah.”
“But what we’re working on, finding this woman who killed the Walkers, that has nothing to do with your grandfather. Right? I don’t get it. I mean, I’m fine with whatever we’re doing, but...”
“If I tell you, you’ll think I’m nuts.”
She smiled.
“Honey, I already think you’re nuts.”
She could see he was thinking about telling her.
But he didn’t.
“I’m not gonna tell you. I’m gonna show you.”
* * *
The storm had filled up most of the eastern horizon by the time they pulled up to Jack’s rambling white stucco beach house at Crescent Beach. A hard onshore wind had risen and w
as ripping the tops off the rollers far out at the horizon line, a sawtooth ridge, churning and grinding. Pandora parked the cruiser under the carport, tucking it up close to Jack’s lime-green sparkle-coat Harley Davidson Electra Glide.
They took a minute to wrap it up in a tarp and tie it off. Pandora didn’t bother teasing him about the fact that he actually had a lime-green sparkle-coat Electra Glide in the first place.
Jack was somewhere inside his head and screwing around putting all the loose bits in the car port into the storage cupboard at the back so the storm wouldn’t blow them all to Tallahassee.
She left him there and walked down to the end of the driveway, folded her arms and thought about that incoming front.
She also paid some attention to a boxy-looking white Mercedes SUV that was parked a hundred feet up the street. It stood out on this wide-open palm-lined avenue of rambling fifties-era homes.
Most of the cars tucked into their driveways were midrange American models—GMCs and Buicks, Fords and Chevys. The Benz just looked...wrong.
The windows were tinted almost black but she could see that there were two shapes in the car, and it looked like the one behind the wheel was on his cell phone right now. She had good eyes and could make out the plate from here: 939 XXZ.
Jack walked up to her just as she was pulling out her radio to call in the plate. At the same time, the Benz fired up, made a slow three-point turn and headed off up the street toward the A1A.
“What’s up?” Jack asked, following her look as she tracked the Benz.
“Don’t know. Benz just looked...wrong.”
“That’s the thing about a Benz. They always look sinister. Around here, if it’s a white Benz, it’s got a real estate agent inside it, and her name will be Tanya Something Russian and she’ll be a five-foot-two-inch bundle of dry twigs in her midfifties with a lizard-skin neck and duck lips and Nancy Pelosi eyes.”
The Benz turned the corner, was gone.
“Remind me not to ask you to describe me in twenty-five words or less.”
“Hah. I only need three.”
She put her finger on his upper lip.
“And I have three for you. None. Of. That.”
* * *
The outside of the house may have been Old Florida in that fifties style, complete with a huge screened-in lanai out back that contained the swimming pool and a threadbare garden and a couple of barrel palms, but the interior was all Barbara Redding. Cool pastel blues and whites, open plan with a very modern kitchen in the back, soft white walls with really fine seascape oils and watercolors. One wall was covered from midway to the ceiling with framed photos taken by Barbara, who was—had been—a very gifted landscape shooter.
There were no people in any of her shots, and Jack had told Pandora that if she inadvertently took a shot and found out later that there were people hidden in it, she very carefully Photoshopped them into oblivion.
Pandora checked the fireplace mantel, where there had been a small collection of family portraits or photos taken when they were in the Caymans. They were all gone. There was nothing up in their place. Just a blank shelf. It said all there was to be said about Jack’s state of mind.
She had been here before, a couple of times, for a pool party or on some police business, and she knew that the master bedroom where Jack and Barbara had slept was shuttered and locked, and had been since before the funerals.
Katy’s room was also locked, and probably shuttered, as well. She hadn’t looked, and didn’t want to. Jack slept in the guest bedroom, at the back of the house, with a view of the pool. Or so he said. From the look of the long pale blue sectional, and the rumpled-up fake-fur throw lying on the back, Pandora was pretty convinced that if Jack slept at all, he slept on that couch. He was living like a guest in his own house. Or a ghost.
Jack walked through to the kitchen, poked around in the massive stainless-steel fridge, turned to ask her what she’d like.
“Are we still on duty?”
She was feeling a little edgy. She’d never been alone in this house with Jack. There had always been other people around. Now it was just the two of them. Their six months of carnal combat was on her mind. Ever since the deaths, Jack had been an emotional zombie. But somewhere deep inside her, Pandora still felt that...ping.
“As Robin Williams used to say, fuck noo. Ditch your gear. Call us in to Dispatch and tell them we’re ten-seven on an investigation. What’s the point of being sergeants if you can’t pull rank now and then. I’ve got Red Stripe, Dos Equis or some of that Barefoot Pinot Grigio.”
“The stuff you can get at Walmart for $7.97 a gallon?”
“Yeah. Nice big bottles too. You used to love that stuff.”
“Way too much. Still do.”
“Ice?”
“One.”
He clanked and clattered around in the kitchen, came out with a glass of Pinot Grigio for her and a frosted Dos Equis for him. He handed her the wineglass, with the ice cube, stripped off his gun belt and harness, and sat down on one of the pale blue chairs. She maneuvered out of her gear and dropped the belt on the floor beside the couch.
“I remembered. About the cube,” said Jack.
“I never doubted it.”
“Actually, I remember everything.”
She sighed, said nothing.
He sighed too, sipped at his beer.
“Feels a little strange, having you here.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
He looked around the house, and then out at the ocean, where the storm was rapidly eating up the sky. The wind was whipping the palms and eight brown pelicans went past in a perfect fighter jet formation, riding the currents.
He was still watching them sail past in a sinuous line, but he was speaking to her.
“Most of the time, I hate being here now.”
“I know. And I don’t blame you. You ever think of selling, maybe getting a condo? Easier to maintain? No bad memories?”
He shook his head.
“Not ready. Maybe someday.”
“Just not now?”
He was silent for a while.
“It’s not just about Barbara and Katy. It’s about my grandfather too. He loved this house, and I kind of grew up here myself. That’s a lot of history to sell off.”
“But you’re not happy here, are you?”
He grinned at her, a twisted smile.
“Well, honey, I’m not happy anywhere else either.”
Pandora saw the pain right on the surface. Her heart went out and she wanted to get up and come over and sit next to him. She didn’t.
She looked at his service piece in its holster.
He picked up on her look right away.
“No. Jeez no. You can relax about that.”
“Can I?”
“Yeah. You can.”
She believed him. Mostly.
She sat back in the couch, took a sip of her wine, watching him over the rim.
“Okay. So, are you gonna tell me what’s going on? It’s got something to do with this house?”
“Yeah. Wait here. I have something I need to dig out. It’ll take a bit.”
A gust of wind, much more powerful this time, and a sudden blast of rain crashed against the window. Jack got up, went over to a control panel by the door, hit a button. There was a muted hum and a fine steel mesh protection screen slowly drew down and covered the seaward windows. You could still see through the mesh, but the storm seemed a little more remote.
“What if the power goes?”
“It usually does,” said Jack. “I’ve got an auxiliary generator. It’ll kick on automatically. Don’t worry. Under the stucco the house is solid stone. We’ll be fine. I’ll be right back.”
He went off down the hall toward their storage area. She sat back, listened to the wind rising. The fron
t was still miles out, but the forward edge was already ripping up the coast, like a circular saw spinning northward. Her cell phone rang—Dixon.
She picked it up.
“Hey, Mace.”
“Where are you guys? I’m watching this storm.”
“At Jack’s house.”
A weighted silence.
“Okay. Well, you better stick there. We’re pulling a lot of units off the street just in case this thing gets really ugly. No point getting all our rolling stock blown to Tallahassee.”
“How’d the conference go?”
“You know the joke about the barrel? It was my turn in the barrel. How did it go up North?”
Pandora laid it out for him. And, after glancing down the hall, she included the part where Jack had a big reaction to the locket description.
“And right after, he heads down to the house?”
“Yeah. With a bullet.”
“And you figure it has something to do with his grandfather? Like how?”
“No idea. But talked about him, on the way down.”
“Yeah? He never does that.”
“Well, he did today. It was like something triggered him.”
“Well, he’s a hunter. Let him hunt. By the way, his idea about rechecking the houses down in Flagler Beach paid off. We’re pretty sure she was in a house right down there, belonged to an old guy named Willard Coleman. Danika Shugrue and Luke...something?”
“Cotton.”
“Yeah, Luke Cotton. They checked it out that night, and there was a woman there, name of Catherine Marcus, said she was one of those Helping Hands nurses. Had ID and she didn’t fit the suspect description, although Shugrue said she had cream all over her face at the time, and she had just gotten out of the shower. They looked in on Coleman and he was breathing, had on one of those sleep apnea masks. So they bought the story and left. Today—after the press conference—one of the neighbors went to check on the guy, got no response, although his car was there. I sent a couple of units, but she was already gone. Place was thoroughly wiped, and that included the shower drain, so we’re looking at a real pro. No sign of Willard Coleman, but somebody wired thirty thousand out of his bank account this morning.”
The Shimmer Page 13
